Thinking Like an Afghan

By PAUL FITZGERALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

For years now, Washington’s political class has been locked in a hand-wringing debate over what to do about Afghanistan. Should the U.S. continue to plan for an extended military engagement? Can “moderate” Taliban somehow be peeled away from fanatical Taliban? Should the U.S. give up on democracy and focus on killing Al Qaeda terrorists with Predator drone assassination attacks, regardless of civilian casualties, public outrage or their legal ambiguity?
 
Although packed with foreign policy experts, the current debate remains largely grounded on what policy best serves Washington’s needs, but in terms of what’s best for Afghans, the answer to all of the above questions is no.
 
For most of the last 70 years nobody in Washington cared much about Afghanistan.  Generations of Washington diplomats found no resources to value or strategy to gain by befriending it. Kabul’s early requests for military assistance in controlling its wild eastern frontier with Pakistan were first ignored and then outright rejected, leaving Afghanistan to seek aid  from the Soviet Union. Conservative 1980’s Washington found the country endlessly useful as a cold war platform for declarations on freedom and self-determination, but then turned it over to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to determine its fate once the Red Army had left.
 
Today, every beltway pundit and media talking-head wants to help president Bema finally get Afghanistan right. But if getting Afghanistan right in 2009 boils down to abandoning everything that the U.S. and the west have invested over the last 7 years, then what do they have to lose by abandoning their old misperceptions?
 
Understanding how to forge a workable strategy  for Afghanistan may be far simpler than anyone to date has considered, if only those with the power to do so in Washington can finally shed their obsolete cold war thinking and start thinking like the Afghans who fought to establish and maintain an independent Afghan nation.
 
Thinking like an Afghan
 
From antiquity, Afghan identity has been rooted in the lands surrounding the Hindu Kush bordering the Indus river. Afghan independence began as an uprising led by a mystical Sufi philosopher Bayezid Ansari against Mughal rule in the 16th century.  Beginning  in 1747, an Afghan dynasty ruled from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea and from Central Asia to Delhi and continued to rule Afghanistan until 1978.
 
Afghan rulers defeated British armies on three separate occasions while masterfully playing Britain’s interests off against imperial Russia’s southward march.  Afghanistan’s late 19th century nation builder, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan faced impossible odds at  keeping Afghanistan independent. Yet, he fought his severest battles against his own relations, his own subjects and his own Pashtun people and he succeeded.
 
For the decade of the 1920’s, despite severe opposition from rural landowners and powerful Mullahs and destabilization from British India, Amir Amanullah Khan moved the country forward through progressive rule while bringing an unprecedented level of rights to women. And while Iran and India were occupied by allied forces during World War II, Afghanistan’s Royal Prime Minister, Hashim Khan maintained Afghanistan’s independence by staying out of the war and adhering to a strict neutrality.
 
Following the creation of  the state of Pakistan, Washington’s cold war objectives and Pakistan’s ambitions formed a single mindset. But that mindset now works against both the United States and Afghanistan as Pakistan’s military intelligence works unceasingly to undermine the efforts of Afghan moderates to establish a viable democratic state.
 
According to a recent Asia Foundation poll, 78 percent of Afghans continue to prefer democracy over any other form of government and despite its shortcomings, 68 percent said they were satisfied with the way democracy was working. An ABC/BBC/ARD National survey of Afghanistan in February found that  58 percent of the population saw the Taliban as the biggest danger while only 4 percent of Afghans support a Taliban government. Yet Washington appears immune from this reality.
 
If President Obama wishes to bring stability to Afghanistan and the region he must learn to see Afghanistan through Afghan eyes, help the Afghans defend their communities from Taliban terror, and give them the help they need to reestablish a genuine civil society.
 
In doing so, he may not only solve Afghanistan’s problems, but begin the renewal of Washington as well.
 

 Afghanistan, a New Beginning  Z Net  April 6, 2009 By Paul Fitzgerald  and Elizabeth Gould
Source: Informed Comment Paul Fitzgerald’s ZSpacePage   

April 2, 2009 Informed Comment.

This statement was made by Charles Cogan, chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Operations Directorate of the CIA from 1979 to 1984 following our presentation of the facts we had presented regarding the true reasons for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan December 27, 1979. 

“I think your account of the Russian motivation at the time of the invasion and afterwards strikes me as being quite authentic. Prime minister Kosygin didn’t vote for the intervention. He had his doubts and he was absent from the meeting.” — Charles Cogan at the Cambridge Forum, February 4, 2009. Cogan was Chief of the Near East-South Asia Division in the Operations Directorate of the CIA from 1979 to 1984. He is now at the Kennedy School.
 

 

You can watch our interview at Back Pages Books, Waltham, MA  hosted by Alex Green on Book TV on CSpan2

The New American Cold War

By Stephen F. Cohen  The Nation    June 21, 2006

US policy has fostered the belief that the American cold war was never really aimed at Soviet Communism but always at Russia, a suspicion given credence by Post and Times columnists who characterize Russia even after Communism as an inherently “autocratic state” with “brutish instincts.”

Read the full article

The Man Who Shouldn’t be King (of Afghanistan)

By PAUL FITZERGALD and ELIZABETH GOULD

It was hoped that t he election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States would bring a change of course to the beleaguered US effort in Afghanistan. But word that representatives of the Taliban and the infamous Afghan drug trafficker and extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might be on the president’s list of possible solutions, looms as a clear sign that the United States is about to step into a trap of its own making.

Employing Afghanistan’s drug-dealing warlords is nothing new for Washington. The U.S. elevated Pakistan’s drug-warlords to beltway cult status vis a vis Charlie Wilson’s War during the Soviet occupation and insisted on including them in the new Afghan government in 2002.  Numerous observers claim that Washington had a hand in the Taliban’s creation as well, standing by as they rolled over Afghanistan in league with Al Qaeda and Pakistan’s Intelligence Service (ISI) in the late 1990’s.

But should Gulbuddin Hekmatyar be allowed to make a political comeback, the new administration may find that partnering with the devil himself might be a better choice than with Afghanistan’s longest running and most notorious holy warrior.

According to a Washington Post report, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami organization is gaining support in every province in Afghanistan. This news followed a Times of London report in which the British ambassador to Afghanistan Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles reportedly stated that the best hope for Afghanistan was to install “an acceptable dictator.”  

Should the Pashtun Hekmatyar emerge as Cowper-Coles’s suitably acceptable dictator, an increasingly desperate and financially impaired U.S. could be faced with a defacto extremist victory. Or could it be that within the serpentine meanderings of Washington’s foreign policy aristocracy, a Taliban/Hekmatyar ruled Afghanistan may have been the plan all along?

America’s multitude of policy mistakes in Afghanistan have mystified many from the beginning. In a February 2, 2009 Times of London Online article, the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown accepted responsibility for the Afghan fiasco admitting that “We are trying to win in Afghanistan with one twenty-fifth the troops and one fiftieth of the aid per head in Bosnia… [T]he real problem is not President Karzai, it’s us.” Yet, much of the ongoing discussion continues to lay blame on beleaguered Afghans while continuing to soft-peddle the Pakistani military’s central role in Afghanistan’s instability.

Throughout the Cold War Pakistan did everything in its power to destabilize a succession of Afghan governments while dismissing Afghanistan’s legitimate grievances regarding its arbitrary 19th century boundary known as the Durand line. Yet Britain’s former secretary of state for defense, Malcolm Rifkind wrote in The Independent  in June of 2007 that the United States and Britain should pressure Afghan President Hamid Karzai to accept the Durand line. And should he not, what are the chances that an acceptable dictatorship of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar might accommodate British and Pakistani demands?

Thanks to Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson and his influential friend Joanne Herring, Hekmatyar received the bulk of U.S. and Saudi money during the 1980’s, despite dire warnings from some of Afghanistan’s most revered religious families that he was a  “monster.” According to  Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Tim Weiner even CIA and State Department officials referred to him as “‘scary,’ ‘vicious,’ ‘a fascist,’ ‘definite dictatorship material.'”

The post-9/11 American and NATO war against the Taliban was widely viewed at the time as a long overdue opportunity to correct the policy mistakes in Afghanistan embodied by the Taliban but beginning with Hekmatyar. But instead of helping Afghans rebuild their nation by providing the necessary security, the war has been turned against the Afghan people.

Today, as Pakistani Taliban, Arab Al Qaeda and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hesb-e Islami fighters once again swarm over the countryside, the western alliance that pledged itself to establishing an Afghan democracy scrambles madly to negotiate its way out of its commitment. 

But in choosing his next step, President Obama should be warned that the record of decision making for American Presidents on Afghanistan is abysmal. Although those decisions presented the Soviet Union with its final test and brought it to its knees, it also planted dreams of conquest in the minds of America’s leaders that have led the United States to find itself caught in its own trap.

 

Asia Times January 21, 2009  By M K Bhadrakumar

The Barack Obama era is commencing on a combative note in Afghanistan. The Afghan bazaar is buzzing with rumors that the equations between Washington and Kabul have become uncertain. Senior Afghan figures have been quoted as concluding that “the new US administration and the current Afghan administration will not be speaking the same language”.

This followed a controversial visit to the Afghan capital Kabul last week by United States vice president-elect Joseph Biden. As the chairman of the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden is not a novice to foreign affairs and diplomacy, or to Afghanistan. Yet, during his visit, Biden apparently pulled up Afghan President Hamid Karzai for not giving a good account of himself as a ruler.

Again, Afghan Foreign Minister Dadfar Spanta has objected to US secretary of state-designate Hillary’s Clinton’s use of the term “narco state” to describe Afghanistan in her Senate testimony last Tuesday on her nomination. He called in the Associated Press specifically to rebut that Clinton’s characterization was “absolutely wrong”. Nerves are getting frayed at the edges.

NATO chief chips in
Alas, the Obama presidency is starting on a false note when close coordination between Washington and Kabul ought to be the hallmark of relations. As if taking a cue from the irate Americans, the secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, tore into the Karzai government in an unprecedented opinion piece in The Washington Post on Sunday, alleging among other things that “the basic problem in Afghanistan is not too much Taliban; it’s too little good governance”.

 For full article

 

The Untold Story of Why the U.S. Is Bound to Fail in Afghanistan
By Ann Jones

The first of 20,000 to 30,000 additional U.S. troops are scheduled to arrive in Afghanistan next month to re-win the war George W. Bush neglected to finish in his eagerness to start another one. However, “winning” the military campaign against the Taliban is the lesser half of the story.

Going into Afghanistan, the Bush administration called for a political campaign to reconstruct the country and thereby establish the authority of a stable, democratic Afghan central government. It was understood that the two campaigns — military and political/economic — had to go forward together; the success of each depended on the other. But the vision of a reconstructed, peaceful, stable, democratically governed Afghanistan faded fast. Most Afghans now believe that it was nothing but a cover story for the Bush administration’s real goal — to set up permanent bases in Afghanistan and occupy the country forever.

For the fill article

 We recently came upon this quote from Defense secretary Robert Gates in a  New York Times article:

“…I think that we’re not likely to see significant cuts,” he said, adding to applause that “the defense budget at the end of the day is a pretty impressive stimulus for the economy.” 

It brought us back to an interview we had done with Economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1979. We began production of a documentary called Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During interviews, we learned from experts that the arms race wasn’t just about defending the United States. The arms race was about power and politics spawned from a union of business, science, and academia and ruled by a self-anointed “priesthood.” By 1979 the Cold War mentality was rationalizing an endless military expansion that one insider described as “a self-licking ice cream cone.”  Economist John Kenneth Galbraith further explained how renewing the Cold War would destroy the civilian economy. He claimed it had already rigidified the capitalist system by bureaucratizing too much production for non-productive uses. He saw American industry becoming more like the Soviet Union, a planned economy designed to suit its own needs at the expense of the whole society.

 A friend asked us this question: What do you feel the real objectives are of the Taliban?  

Here is our answer:  Pakistani/CIA trained drug trafficker and war criminal Gulbuddin Hekmatyar became the CIA’s favorite in America’s secret war against Moscow in the 1980’s thanks to Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson. Hekmatyar received the bulk of U.S. and Saudi money, despite outraged pleas from representatives of some of Afghanistan’s most revered religious families who denounced Gulbuddin “as a true monster and an enemy of Afghanistan… a dangerous fundamentalist, busy assassinating moderate Afghans, a man no self-respecting nation should support.” As a student at Kabul University in the late sixties, Hekmatyar earned an ugly reputation as a dangerous fanatic. Hekmatyar’s followers were known to be violently misogynist-throwing acid in the faces of women who did not wear the veil. Hekmatyar inaugurated the jihadist war against Afghanistan in 1973 with the covert assistance of Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s intelligence chief, Naseerullah Babar. The Taliban’s was a creation of Babar’s ISI during the Benazir Bhutto administration with the tacit blessing of the US. When Hekmatyar’s  takeover  of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal failed, the Taliban took over.  The post-9/11 war against the Taliban was widely viewed at the time as a long overdue opportunity to correct the policy mistakes in Afghanistan embodied by the Taliban  but beginning with Hekmatyar. But instead of helping Afghans rebuild their nation by providing the necessary security, the war has turned once again against the Afghan people. Today, as Pakistani Taliban, and Hekmatyar’s fighters once again swarm over the countryside, due mainly to the failure of America’s policy makers,  the western alliance that pledged itself to establishing an Afghan democracy scrambles to negotiate its way out of its commitment by offering to share political power with Hekmatyar and the Taliban. Pakistan’s ISI would benefit from sharing power with Hekmatyar and the Taliban by adding strategic depth for their eventual war with India. But it would be a catastrophe for the Afghan people, once again.  

In an interview with Amy Goodman, Robert Dreyfuss, author of  Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam,  details a similar pattern of short-sighted decision making followed by a complete disassociation from the responsibility to the civilian populations when it came to the creation of Hamas.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. How was Hamas established?  

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, gosh, you know, you can go back, really 60 or 70 years. The Hamas organization is an outgrowth, really a formal outgrowth, of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a transnational organization founded in Egypt, which established branches in the ’30s and ’40s in Jordan and Palestine and Syria and elsewhere. And the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded by a man named Said Ramadan, actually the father of Tariq Ramadan, who you mentioned earlier. Said Ramadan was one of the founders of the Brotherhood, who was the son-in-law of its originator, Hassan al-Banna, and he established the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and in Jerusalem in 1945. And it grew rapidly during the ’40s and was, not surprisingly, a very conservative political Islamic Movement that had a lot of support from the Hashemite royal family of Jordan and from the king of Egypt.  For the full interview